


Stones, Fjords and Umbrellas

by natmerc



Category: Forever Knight
Genre: Character of Color, Gen, Humor, Male-Female Friendship, POV Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-17
Updated: 2010-05-17
Packaged: 2017-10-14 04:30:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/145387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/natmerc/pseuds/natmerc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Denise Ford and Captain Stonetree have a working relationship, or rather, they will have, but everything needs to start somewhere.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stones, Fjords and Umbrellas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hearts-blood](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Hearts-blood).



> Originally posted in the LJ community fkficfest in 2010 with the original recipient of the ficathon being LJ user Hearts-blood. Reposted in AO3 Dec 2010.

  
Stonetree gazed across his desk. There was a large pile of papers on his left and a large stack of reports on his right. The mayor had called him that morning about the naked dead man in the park, and two local politicos were doing their due diligence by annoying him as well. He expected it to rain a commissioner before the day’s end. Now he had this woman, wearing a long cotton skirt with large blue flowers, and three layers of shirts that almost completely encased her upper body.  The perfectly made up face with the dark eye-shadow and dark red lipstick struck an odd contrast with the casual clothes.

And she was telling him that the crows needed to be fed.

“Ms... Fjord?”

“No, it’s Ford, Miss Denise Ford.” She smiled and it lit up her face. Dark brown tight curls spilled down to just past her shoulders. “I know that you might have a hard time believing that I’m a psychic.” She turned to her side and started rooting around in her purse and she pulled out a small tattered card. “I moved from London last year after... I moved here and it’s been much quieter in my head until yesterday. Here,” she handed him the card. “It’s to my old contact in Scotland Yard. He’ll confirm I can do what I say I can.”

“And you had a vision of the dead man in the park?” Stonetree took the card. It was battered and aging, with a small tear in the upper right corner. Her voice had a light English accent that made her sound like Mary Poppins.

“Yes. The crows needed to feed.”

Stonetree blinked and his stomach rumbled. In his head, a vision of Mary Poppins went flying crazily away with her umbrella. It was almost suppertime and he still had another six hours to go before his shift ended. He hated second shift, but at least it was better than third shift. After three am, he wasn’t worth a plugged nickel, no matter how much he tried to rearrange his sleep schedule.

The new guy who had transferred in a couple weeks back had requested a special shift, saying he was allergic to sunlight, and handing in all sorts of medical papers to get special dispensation to work around his disability by changing his work hours throughout the year. The higher-ups liked him and he’d gotten his way, but Stonetree was keeping an eye on him. All sorts of alarm bells had gone off the moment he’d seen him, and they were ringing right now, looking at this woman too. His wombat-alarm, as his wife liked to put it.

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the commissioner through the window in his door. The commissioner was in the main room, looking back and forth, clearly looking for someone – him?

“Miss Ford. Let’s go to the morgue,” he said, dropping the card on his desk. He’d phone later, after getting a confirmation that the number and name were actually to the man in question, and confirm the man worked at Scotland Yard.

On the way to the morgue Miss Ford told him that his wife liked hazelnut chocolate better than the almond chocolates he’d been buying her for years, that Constable Nicholson was moonlighting as a bouncer in his cop uniform – a fact he’d already known, and that she was still a bit nervous about having the car driving on the right side of the road.

The dead man was still in the morgue; that was good. A few weeks back, a badly burned corpse had disappeared and the folder for that case was still on the unsolved paperwork side of his desk. With no leads, and all the trace evidence gone as well, they could find the corpse decomposing under a bush somewhere and they still wouldn’t be able to positively ID the poor man.

Dr. Natalie Lambert, however, was not in the morgue.

“Good evening, Grace.”

“Captain Stonetree. How are things?” Grace looked Miss Denise Ford up and down in a thorough manner. She seemed amused when the young woman starting to run her hand up and down the side of one of the metal examination tables.  Thankfully, it was clean.

“Fine, fine – it’s raining public officials, all wanting to know why a one armed naked dead man is in a park, or rather why a group of elementary kids on a school trip should find him instead of the Metro Police.  I just want to know why he ended up in the 27th Precinct’s area so I have to deal with him.”

“There was a dead man here who was still alive.” Denise Ford was still rubbing the table. “I can’t see him clearly. It’s too dark.”

That made as much sense as the crows. He really shouldn’t be bothering with this woman.  “Could you bring out John Doe? Miss Ford here’s a psychic who has volunteered her expert services to identify him.”

The Miss Ford in question had taken a couple steps across the room and was now peering under Natalie’s desk. “Is that a cat?”

Grace looked flustered. “I’m sorry, Captain Stonetree. I know it’s against regulations, but Natalie was taking him home from the vet when she got called in to a priority scene. She didn’t know how long she’d be, and this was on the way, and...”

“She take him out of the cage?”

“Of course not!” Grace looked at him like he’d asked if Natalie had decided to rub the cat across a corpse or two. Her eyes looked straight at him for a second, then looked away. Guilty of something?

“You petted him.” Denise Ford crouched down and stuck a couple of fingers through an opening. The sleek cat moved over and underneath her fingers, giving her the opportunity for a quick neck scratch, which she took. “Good boy, good Sydney.”

Grace started. “How’d you know his name?”

“He told me. Didn’t you?” The last was to the gray and white cat who was audibly purring now.

“Why don’t you get the dead man, Grace?” His stomach rumbled again and he checked his watch. His weekly Thursday supper of tofu burger and fries would be at the precinct by now.

In another minute, Grace had pulled out the John Doe into the room.  He seemed young, Caucasian, of average height.  There were no distinguishing features beyond the missing arm, and that was new.  They were running his picture on the local stations, but hadn’t had any luck so far. The way the sheet fell across his right side was disquieting and Stonetree was glad the man was covered.

He watched Miss Ford did her prescient woojoo job over the man, touching him on the temple, the shoulder and the bridge of the nose, and then putting both hands flat on the sides of his head, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. She looked more abstracted than upset.

“You get your fun touching dead men, Miss Ford?” Stonetree didn’t really believe her as a suspect, but she was the only lead in the case he had. He should have passed her on to one of his detectives, maybe that loudmouth Detective Schanke, but then he couldn’t have gotten out of the building. Knowing the cat’s name was a bit strange, but he knew a lot of these flakes researched before they tried their con, and information about their coroner would be part of it.

“I’m not a flake, Captain Stonetree.” Her eyes were still closed and her forehead wrinkled.

“Huh.” He sniffed. “Then tell me about the dead man then.”

“Leonard.... MacVeigh, MacDee, Mac Mac Mac-something or other. MacDonald. Leonard MacDonald.” Her hand hovered over his head. “His spirit talked to me this morning, but it was confused. The sound of wings and crows feeding was the strongest, but that was near the after.”

“And now?”

“Tripped and fell. Drunk. With some friends. Eddy and Jack.” Her face creased with a flash of pain. “Passed out partly on the rail tracks and woke up when the train ran over his arm. He saw the blood leaving him like a river and saw the birds just before he died.”

“Where’s his arm?” A train was as good an explanation as anything else, and Doctor Lambert’s preliminary report did suggest a major trauma that crushed as well as severed the missing arm.

“By the track.”

“There’s a lot of track through the city of Toronto, Miss Ford.”

“The crows need to feed. Look for the crows.”

Back to the crows. Stonetree blinked, then walked over to Natalie’s phone. “Jerry? ... Yeah... Still there? ... Huh. Well assign someone, Detective Schanke should be free, to head down to the rail tracks closest to the park where the naked dead man was found. Tell him to get the workers to walk along them and look for the man’s missing arm.... I know it’ll be hard to find.... Look for a bunch of crows then, they’ll eat most anything. I've also had a tip that the man's name was Leonard MacDonald.  See what information we have in our database on him.”

He dropped the phone back into the handset much more softly than he wanted to. No point in breaking phones; he’d learned that a long time ago. “So where’d his clothes go? How’d he get to the park?”

“He’s dead now.” Miss Ford said, as if that meant something.

“Yes, so?”

She sighed. “Sorry. I worked with Constable Jerries so long, it’s hard to know how to phrase things. I pick things up from the living, and echoes around objects. When someone’s close to death, I can get very strong impressions, even from far away, but near death it gets confused, and afterwards they don’t talk to me hardly at all. The spirit can linger for a short time, but they can’t communicate well.”

“You got the train track story out of him. He talked to you there,” Stonetree pointed to the dead man on the table, a white cloth modestly pulled up to his neck.

“His living spirit self talked to me last night. I just came here to hear him clearly. But now his spirit self is gone.”

Wombats. The day was filled with wombats. Next there’d be vampires coming out of the woodwork.

“Tell you what, Miss Ford.” He nodded to Grace, who was still watching the whole spectacle with an amused look on her face. “Let’s go back to the precinct. We can stop at a vendor I know and pick up some food on the way. Then we’ll wait and see if that arm turns up, and you can tell me what my wife wants for her birthday.”

“Not a frying pan. She said she wants a frying pan, but don’t give it to her for her birthday.”

“Right. No frying pan.” He guided her out of the morgue and towards his car. “Why’d you leave England?”

“Lottery. I couldn’t handle the press.”

“You win?”

“Twice,” she smiled, “you’d think I was psychic.”  



End file.
